New, yes, but is that bad?… Amazon’s first physical bookshop in Seattle.
Photograph: Amazon

You could describe it as a troubling development in publishing: someone comes along with no real knowledge of the book business, a brash salesman who sells books cheaply, undercuts established rivals, drives them out of business. Then he moves into publishing as well, and allows people to publish themselves without recourse to the gatekeeping taste-makers.

But I’m not talking about Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I’m talking about James Lackington, who turned the book business upside down – at the end of the 18th century. His London bookshop accepted cash only, so he could slash prices, and he used his accumulated wealth to buy whole libraries and pounce on publishers’ remaindered stock to sell dirt cheap. One of the books his company subsequently published in exchange for a payment from the author’s husband was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

He loved books, and was a whirlwind in a previously staid industry.

Change will always arouse fear in some people, and this is as true of the book business as it is of any other. George Orwell thought Penguin paperbacks were a superb development, but he also thought the availability of cheap books would be disastrous for the book trade. Now we know: it wasn’t. A lot of people thought the end of the Net Book Agreement, which fixed their prices in the UK, would be equally calamitous and limit the variety of titles published. Now we know: it didn’t.

And now, we have Amazon. I have to declare an interest because, having been published by traditional imprints in the past, I’ve now crossed over to the dark side: I’m an Amazon author, through their Thomas and Mercer crime/thriller imprint. Except it isn’t the dark side. It’s a retail, publishing and media content company. The publishing arm is run by people who are passionate about books and are utter professionals. The company itself uses an evidence-based approach to marketing and selling those books, not relying on the way it has always been done (posters on railway stations, etc). It finds new ways of reaching people – admittedly, with the handy tool of having the world’s largest store as its laboratory.

Yet the view of Amazon from the wider literary world has become increasingly poisonous, to the extent that people have responded with grave concern because the Evil Empire is now … opening bookstores! Is this what we’ve come to, that the opening of new bookstores is something to be feared?

Yes – because apparently Amazon will use that retail power to shut down other stores and to force crippling terms on other publishers. So, like the supermarkets then? Supermarkets have done more to threaten dedicated bookstores even than the rise of Amazon, and they’ve done so with the complicity of publishers. It’s hard to see how supermarket book sales can be seen as a vital channel for publishers, but dedicated bookstores opened by Amazon are the death knell of the industry.

The other argument I’ve seen trotted out is that the bricks-and-mortar stores are a tacit admission by Amazon that ebooks are running out of steam, and that its model for selling online is no longer working. Given the explosive growth of ebooks in the last decade, it’s hardly surprising that sales are flattening, but I know from my own experience that there are enormous numbers of people out there happily reading on Kindles. I also know that my last book, A Death in Sweden, sold more copies in six weeks through Amazon than the global sales of all my previous titles combined. Until then, I was always an “author’s author”, but even so the figures don’t suggest a model that’s broken to me.

I haven’t become one of the fan-boys Lee Child was talking about in his article on this subject. I still like to read real books, I still support my local indie bookseller and my local Waterstones (in turn, my local indie also stocks my Amazon-published books, whereas Waterstones … doesn’t). And I still have a lot of friends who work for or are published by traditional houses. But I remain baffled at the vitriol that’s directed towards Amazon.

It is just a company that’s got big ambitions and is revolutionising the way we shop, read, watch TV and films. If you don’t like what Amazon’s doing, don’t shop there. But it’s here to stay and is already becoming part of the fabric of our lives – maybe give it 200 years and people will wonder what all the fuss was about.